We the undersigned unanimously agree that the Executive Order issued by acting Governor Earl Ray Tomblin is inadequate and leaves communities vulnerable, while continuing to let the gas industry run roughshod over West Virginia.

The Senate should not be using the Executive Order as an excuse for stalling.  Instead, the Senate should impose a moratorium on permits until a comprehensive bill becomes effective.

Many people, including Senate members of the Select Committee on Marcellus Shale, are under the illusion that the Executive Order and the resulting emergency rules are adequate enough to ensure safe, responsible development of the Marcellus Shale.

However, a number of important issues remain unaddressed.

• Nothing in the Executive Order addresses protection from air pollution, noise, truck traffic destroying roads, radiation, or the cumulative impact of multiple wells in a community.
• While the Executive Order does require public notice of well permits inside a municipality, it does not provide an opportunity for the public to comment on such permits and influence the permit conditions, nor does it require public notice and comment for well permits in rural areas.
• Surface owners remain at risk from unilateral decisions by the gas companies. There is no requirement for drillers to negotiate with surface owners on the location of well sites and access roads or that drillers accommodate surface owners’ concerns, plans for or uses of their property.

Other items missing from the Executive Order include:

• Protection for karst (limestone) areas.
• Protection for parks or other public lands.
• A TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) standard for water.
• Elimination of the industry-influenced Oil and Gas Inspectors Examining Board in favor of a civil service type of hiring procedure.
• Protective/adequate distances between large drill sites and homes, schools, hospitals and other sensitive places.
• Expanded water well testing requirements.
• Improvements to bonding requirements.
• Disposal of toxic waste from well sites restricted to landfills designed to accept hazardous waste.

Additionally, regulations are only as good as their enforcement and with only 15 inspectors for 59,000 active gas wells, we remain concerned about the DEP’s ability to  adequately protect citizens and the environment from the threats Marcellus development poses to human health and our land, air and water. Unfortunately, the emergency rules filed as a result of the Executive Order will not raise permit fees and will not provide money for more inspectors to enforce even those emergency rules.

DEP has already permitted 1,602 Marcellus wells in West Virginia. Of those, 942 of those are completed and producing and the agency is on track to issue another 400 permits this year.

We believe it is irresponsible for the acting Governor and the Legislature to allow the DEP to continue to issue new permits without having a comprehensive regulatory structure in place and without having enough inspectors on staff to ensure adequate enforcement.  We appreciate that acting Governor Tomblin has recognized that there are problems, but the Executive Order does not go far enough.

It remains imperative for the Legislature to act.

Until that time there should be a moratorium on new permits.

In conclusion, acting Governor Tomblin’s Executive Order and the resulting emergency rules should not be construed as a solution to the many problems related to Marcellus Shale and other gas well drilling.

Far from it.

The Select Committee assigned to craft meaningful legislation, especially the Senators, need to step up to address these problems, and they must do so quickly — next year is unacceptable. Although the draft legislation the committee is using as a starting point is also deficient in terms of addressing several issues of concern, a number of strengthening amendments were offered and adopted when the committee met earlier this month.  We want to see the committee reconvene to continue its work and make the needed improvements to the bill.

Greenbrier River Watershed Association

Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

Sierra Club West Virginia Chapter

West Virginia Citizens Action Group

West Virginia Highlands Conservancy

West Virginia Surface Owners Rights Organization

SavetheWaterTable.org

By Kate Coil for The Register-Herald : Mon Jan 17, 2011, 12:02 AM EST

UNION — Though acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin has announced he intends to utilize the natural gas of the Marcellus shale, residents of Monroe County, who live above the shale, say drilling into the area will decimate their culture, safety and even endangered species in the area.

Jill Fischer, co-president of the Save the Water Table organization, said drilling on the Marcellus shale puts citizens at risk.

“It sounds to me like Gov. Tomblin wants to exploit West Virginia,” Fischer said. “The state has been a supplier of the nation’s coal and supplies power and industry. Though we supply all of these corporations, if you look around at our income, health and other factors, we are at the bottom when compared to every other state.

“What has been exploited in West Virginia is not our natural resources but our people. We are facing a pretty hard thing. When it comes to them prospecting for drilling sites, Monroe County’s prospects aren’t good.”

Fischer said county residents are working to prevent hydrofracture drilling or “fracking” in their area. Fracking is a process in which a well is drilled several thousand feet into the ground. From that one well, several other well holes are then created in a variety of directions with multiple horizontal bores, covering a wide area underground.

Next, Fischer said around 1 million to 2 million gallons of water are injected into the well holes, augmented with various chemicals to release natural gas within the shale. Each drilling site requires 4 to 5 acres of land and are in constant operation.

Fischer said Save the Water Table has been working to energize the rural communities in Monroe County about the issue.

See the rest of this entry »

I did go to the meeting on the 14th, led by Dale McCutcheon and Howdy Henritz.  They gave out the one page from the regulations about what drillers must do re your water–you could get a copy of it from Dale (his office number is the same as that for the Monroe Health Center).  Basically, they cannot drill within 1000 ft of an existing well (meaningless in karst) and they have to give notice to land owner–various ways detailed.

Dale and Howdy have made arrangements with REIC (a water testing lab in Beckley) to test for the basics that would show up from a well contaminated by drilling–cost $200.  The samples must be collected by a “licensed person”–Howdy and Dale qualify, and not by landowner.  They are collecting names so they can do it by areas.  If you don’t have a baseline test done, you’re out of luck if your well or spring is polluted.  On the other hand, if your well is polluted, the drillers are not going to do much–maybe bring you bottled water the rest of your life.

At the meeting also were Rocky Parsons and Dennis White.  Rocky had maps of the karst showing the lineament–a crack though the area marked by many sinkholes and which cavers believe may contain fabulous caves–pretty much unexplored.  (He also had marked on it the flow length and direction of the known dye tests.)  Cavers say that drilling MUST NOT be done anywhere near the lineament.  The first well planned is right near it.

Merri Morgan

Presentation to The Office of Oil and Gas | DEP Charleston Headquarters | 601 57th Street S.E. | Charleston, WV 25304 | Coopers Rock Training Room | July 28, 2010

I am Ba Rea, a resident of Monroe County.  I am speaking for the Indian Creek Watershed Association, SavetheWaterTable.org, and many individual Monroe County citizens. We are concerned about planned drilling in our county for gas from the Marcellus Shale formation.

Monroe County is a beautiful rural area in southeastern West Virginia. Much of it rests on karst formation.

The Greenbrier limestone formation dominates the landscape lying over the Marcellus Shale in Monroe County. It accounts for over 70 square miles in the center of Monroe County including Union, Pickaway, Sinks Grove, and parts of Greenville and Wolf Creek.  Swopes Knobs is a remnant of the Bluefield formation comprised of red and green shale with a few thin limestone lenses.  It rests on top of the Greenbrier formation, draining onto the Greenbrier karstland to the north, east and west.

Monroe County karstland is one of the world’s densest sinkhole plains, with an average of 18 sinkholes per square kilometer. This limestone also hosts the largest, deepest, and most complex caves, the largest karst basins, the largest number of caves, and one of the largest karst springs in West Virginia.

The 1925 West Virginia Geological Survey listed 49 caves in Monroe County. Hundreds are known today, including the extensive Scott Hollow cave system found in 1985.  Scott Hollow drains an area of at least a fourteen square miles and possibly much more. Mystic River, the underground river flowing through the Scott Hollow cave system, stretches five miles from deep under the Knobs to within two miles of the Greenbrier River. Twenty-eight miles of cave passages have been mapped so far in Scott Hollow.

Modern day Monroe County was shaped by the Appalachian Orogeny roughly 270 to 225 million years ago. This area was uplifted, deposition of sediments ceased, and erosion began taking place. Marcellus shale outcrops can be found along the southeastern boundary of the county as a result of folding. In front of modern day Peters Mountain, older rock overrides the limestone and shale that dominates the rest of the county.  Erosion from this ancient uplift ultimately exposed the Greenbrier formation and also cracked and rippled it creating synclines, anticlines and lineaments as well as many smaller fractures.  This structure, in addition to erosion makes the underground paths of our water even harder to predict. In addition to caves, our karst formation also has many cracks tunnels and fissures, some dramatic.  The monitor lineament is an easily spotted straight line across the Monroe county landscape.  On close observation it is a six-mile long string of sinkholes, likely caused by water flowing along an ancient fracture and slowly dissolving the limestone, causing it to collapse.  Cavers doing dye testing and expecting that water would follow the Monitor lineament were surprised to find the dyes had crossed the lineament and ended up in Second Creek.

Monroe County is a rural community. Though public water is available in Union, Greenville and Peterstown, most of the county depends on springs and wells for water. Since Monroe County does not have streams with the capacity to provide for public water supply sources, almost all residents rely on groundwater for their water consumption needs.  The public supplies available, which provide for about half of the county usage, primarily rely on springs or wells for their intake.

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• The karst forming unit in Monroe is the Lower Carboniferous Greenbrier Limestone which covers about 70 square miles centered around Union, Pickaway and Sinks Grove, with smaller patches around Greenville and Wolf Creek.
• A count of 168 large sinkholes was determined from the central zone giving a density of four per square mile.
• No surface streams occur over much of the karst except near the margins where the flow can be shown to be underground during dryer seasons, confirming that underground flow occurs most of the time.  This is true of Indian Creek and its tributaries, Laurel Creek and Hans Creek around Greenville.
• The Greenbrier Limestone has low porosity so polluted water entering the cave system would not benefit from the natural filtration effects of the groundwater table, but would pass directly into wells and beyond into the Greenbrier and New Rivers.
• The Greenbrier karst phenomenon is limited to Monroe, and adjacent Greenbrier Counties and to a smaller extent, Pocahontas County.  (Caves are present in the folded rocks of the Valley and Ridge Province of the Appalachians but are mostly limited to the much older Cambro-Ordovician formations which are not subject to deep drilling.)
• Surface exposures of the Greenbrier Limestone are riddled with fissures so the general picture is of an anastomosing meshwork of large and small caves which continue to be discovered and mapped but have not been fully tested with die tracers to determine flow patterns.
• The conclusion is that the Greenbrier Limestone poses a major challenge to proposed gas drilling.
• Questions arising are:
  • How could wells be adequately cased in such a formation?
  • How could failures of the highly pressurized “fracking” process be avoided?
  • How will the containment ponds be designed to avoid rupture?
  • How will trucking accidents be avoided on the narrow, switch-back roads typical of Monroe County?

Fred Ziegler | Geologist | Professor Emeritus, The University of Chicago

Source : Mountain Messenger

Excerpt from Peggy Mackenzie’s article in the Mountain Messenger:

We are seeing profit-hungry motivated behavior mount as gas drilling companies scramble for leases in karst country. Like any “gold rush,” the money is so good.  Karst topography is a landscape created by groundwater dissolving sedimentary rock such as limestone, according to the website watersheds.org. Karst makes our Valley especially vulnerable when it comes to drilling.

As information streams in concerning the use of hydraulic fracture drilling for natural gas in the abundantly rich shale fields around the country and especially the Marcellus shale which lies beneath West Virginia and other states in the eastern US, it has been pointed out that natural gas is cleaner that coal and oil. Lawmakers, and members of the oil and gas industry along with the media have jumped on the bandwagon touting natural gas as America’s latest clean energy effort.

But, as Myles Yates of SaveTheWaterTable.org says, “Get it straight: Natural gas extracted by way of hydraulic fracture is NOT clean energy.”

Yates, a Monroe County resident, states firmly that “…it is important to note that those statements refer exclusively to the BURNING of natural gas. It does not and cannot possibly refer to the process of extraction, or hydraulic fracturing – a largely unregulated process that exists in its current format solely because the companies that perform it have been exempted from the Clean Water Act.

“Make no mistake,” Yates goes on to say, “contaminating our water supply in the process of harvesting a clean-burning fuel is NOT CLEAN. Spraying a mix of water, sand, and nearly 600 chemicals (including carcinogens and nuerotoxins and more) into the ground by the millions of gallons (only to recover 10-50 percent, leaving the rest deep in the ground) is NOT GREEN.”

All this has bearing on the health of our watersheds in West Virginia. Water is the real gold. We have it in abundance and take it for granted.

According to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), there are more than 500 gas wells in the state targeting the Marcellus shale formation. Like most states where such gas drilling has occurred, West Virginia has experienced its share of contamination problems and other issues linked with fracking operations.

Read more>>

Ladies and gentlemen,

Those who attended the SWTO Meeting 001, THANK YOU kindly for your interest and your support.  You are our charter members, and from you, our organization will live or die.

Thank you graciously to our presenters, Fritz Boettner of Downstream Strategies, Lewis Baker from the WV Rural Water Association, Dale McCutcheon and Laurine Yates, educated and concerned MoCo citizens.  Thank you as well to all attendees who offered their thoughts, opinions, and research – or even just silent support.

I believe we had a productive information sharing session, and that was truly what we needed as a first collective step.  We now must assume that despite minor [even major] idiosyncrasies in our perspectives or approaches or fields of expertise – everyone that was in the room last night is fundamentally on the same page:

We agree.  And we agree that the consequences of not acting now are profoundly unlovely and long-lasting.

And so we will now set out to accomplish the impossible – to ban the use of hydraulic fracturing in Monroe County (that is, unless it conforms to the Clean Water Act).  Now we will set our powerful collective human resources into motion; we will organize and we will strategize – and then we will get moving.

It begins by forming the ranks and structure of our organization, and by defining its intentions, processes, and timeline.

All this and more, to discuss:

Next Tuesday, 7pm, Senior Citizen Center.

We hope you will join us.

~SWTO Team